The media ended the year 2012 with wall-to-wall coverage of the mass murder at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. Other pre-Christmas carnage — one at a shopping mall in Oregon and another in upstate New York that involved burning down a neighborhood and shooting firefighters — might have claimed more sensational coverage had the December 14 incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School not been especially poignant: Of the 26 victims, 20 were children.

President Barack Obama addressed the nation the day of the Newtown tragedy, appearing to wipe away the occasional tear and laying the groundwork for an assault on the National Rifle Association, where there are few votes for Democrats. It was, sad to say, politics as usual, with the mainstream media pleased that their rather robotic hero, Mr. Obama, displayed apparent emotion and the left now had new ammunition for attacking the Second Amendment.

The whole lamentable spectacle was put in its proper moral perspective by a comment from an unlikely source: Matt Drudge. (See: “Matt Drudge Tweets: Abortion Killing 3,500 Babies Every Day”.) The Drudge Report has long been the bane of the mainstream media (MSM) for its honesty in reporting all the news, especially highlighting the significant events the MSM either ignores or fails to investigate properly. In his Tweet, Drudge noted that 3,500 children would die that day, without the president shedding a tear. “Normal day,” he concluded. He was, of course, alluding to the number of babies that would be killed that day — and every day — by abortionists, who are the special protégés of Obama and his Party.

In another bit of significant news “missed” by the MSM, Sandy Hook Elementary reopened in January with an armed guard inside the school, a suggestion for school security made by Wayne La Pierre, president of the National Rifle Association and bête noir of the left and its media pundits. (See: “Sandy Hook Elementary Opens Under NRA Recommendation of Armed Security”.)

So 2013 begins as 2012 ended, with its daily toll of mutilated babies, posturing politicians, carefully managed “news” and a Catholic hierarchy that is, for the most part, missing in action.

We must also keep informed. Read the recent “Fatima Perspective” articles listed below.

Campaign to Label Catholic Church
a Hate Group Intensifies

Christmas Day was marked by the appearance on the White House web site of a petition to the Obama Administration to declare the Catholic Church a “hate group.” (See: “White House petitioned to label Catholic Church a 'hate group'”.) The Holy Father was said to have “demeaned and belittled homosexual people around the world.”

Pope Benedict's Christmas address to the Roman Curia was the ostensible cause of the petition. The Holy Father rejected the “philosophy of sexuality” that regards sexual identity as socially transmitted rather than given by nature. Attempts to redefine sexuality as a product of social conditioning were designated by the Holy Father as “absurd.” (See: “Benedict Defends Traditional Family in Christmas Address to Roman Curia”.)

At stake, of course, is the definition of marriage. The Obama Administration has abandoned its coyness on the issue and now squarely supports legal parity between heterosexual and homosexual “spouses.” The weak voice and failing influence of the Catholic bishops in the recent presidential election carried through on November ballot initiatives in which voters on the state level for the first time approved “homosexual marriage.”

Illinois is the latest battleground state. Chicago's Cardinal George mounted a lobbying effort against the measure (see: “Cardinal George issues letter urging Catholics to oppose gay marriage bill”), but it may be a case of too little, too late. And as with most “pastoral” approaches toward the question of homosexual “marriage,” the Cardinal assumes a defensive posture, pleading with his listeners to recognize that he and the Church are not “anti-gay.”

What he means, of course, is that he and the Church do not hate people who are homosexual. Hatred, of course, is a sin against charity, as homosexual sodomy is a sin against nature — one of the four sins that cries to Heaven for vengeance. But in attempting to make the Church appear “welcoming” to homosexuals, His Eminence risks minimizing the definition of homosexual sin as an “intrinsic evil.”

“The Church also welcomes adulterers, murderers, thieves, liars, blasphemers and all manner of sinners, but as penitents. Homosexual groups are unlikely to respond to such a welcome, but it is the only one the Church can honestly offer. No Catholic church hangs out banners to make adulterers feel at home. Why should the Church do so for homosexuals?

The year 2013 is likely to see the growing acceptance of homosexual “marriage”, legally and socially. The Catholic Church is not in a position to prove either an effective or, in some cases, a willing advocate for traditional marriage. The homosexual scandals that have plagued the clergy, including the cover-ups by several bishops, make the Church's official opposition to the homosexual “rights” liable to the charge of being either insincere or hypocritical.

Those in the Church who are prepared to stand by her teaching had better be prepared to be vilified by the media, scorned by society and, in some cases, prosecuted by the law. And the Holy Father will doubtless be subjected to intensifying assaults. We must pray for the Pope, as the suffering predicted by Our Lady of Fatima for the Holy Father and the Church appears to be close at hand.

Latest Fatima Perspectives

Marriage Has Nothing to Do with Religion? — The principal reason the Catholic Church today finds herself reduced to impotence before the power of the secular State is the timid refusal of contemporary churchmen to preach to power, and defend with courage, the revealed truths of their own religion. In the wake of Vatican II's vaunted “opening to the contemporary world” — a total debacle for the Church — Catholic churchmen have seemingly accepted a pact of silence concerning the Law of the Gospel.

Is Putin on the Way Out? — In a recent article The London Telegraph reported that the Russian newspaper Vedomosti has cited “two Kremlin-linked sources” who revealed that Vladimir Putin “exacerbated an old back problem” during a publicity stunt in which, portraying himself as Mr. Vigorous, he flew in a motorized hang glider to guide a flock of Siberian cranes flying south for the winter. There is something very mysterious about this “back injury.” As the Telegraph notes, Putin announced that “he would not do his annual call-in show on television, usually held in early December.” How would “an old back problem” prevent Putin from appearing on a call-in show?

Müller's Muddle — An article in the Catholic Herald online is emblematic of the state of diabolical confusion engendered by the Second Vatican Disaster, which is the only way to describe the aftermath of a Council whose “true meaning” has yet to be clarified, half a century after it ended. As reported by the Catholic Herald, Archbishop Gerhard Müller, who has been placed in charge of “reconciling” the Society of Saint Pius X, declares that “Traditionalist and progressive camps that see the Second Vatican Council as a 'rupture' both espouse a 'heretical interpretation' of the Council and its aims.”

Revival? What Revival? — As the Vatican II “renewal” of the Church continues the post-conciliar “process of decay” admitted by Cardinal Ratzinger in The Ratzinger Report, the defenders of the conciliar “springtime” — blind to the deep winter their “reforms” have provoked — are perpetrating the myth of a revival in bloom. Really? How, then, to explain statistics recently reported by Catholic World News?

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